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- Hacker News
- There's a lot here I agree with and a lot I disagree with. If I'm doing any kind of serious data work I'm probably not reaching for a spreadsheet for things like processing, manipulation, statistical analysis. But if I'm presenting tabular data, or god forbid editing it? I'm using a spreadsheet --- and I've built a whole side project out of making working with CSVs as tabular data as pleasant as opening my favorite text editor.by wkirby
- 1) Today I learned that named cells exist in Excel.
2) Excel is great for technical and non-technical people. You can teach Excel even to 10-year-olds (I first used it when I was a student around that age).
3) 1,048,576 rows are more than enough for 99% of Excel use-cases.
4) Excel can connect to external data sources, like databases and APIs, which can perform heavier and more complex data operations, taking this responsibility away from the spreadsheet. SQL queries and procedure calls can be embedded inside Excel spreadsheets.
5) There are some Excel skills, like named cells and VBA functions, that most people don't know. It's a matter of sharing knowledge with them, so they can make better spreadsheets.
- My beef with spreadsheets is their use as manually updated tracking tools, whose inconsistent formatting makes automation tricky.
Luckily AI can update junky spreadsheets but I think "don't" is the best position I've heard yet.
by newsomix9xl - I generally agree with the logic -- I don't like using spreadsheets for anything complex, or that has the shelf life of more than, say, a month. I can remember my logic for putting together all the complex formulas for a while, but eventually I have to recreate my own logic, reverse engineering everything, and it's frustrating.
But when one of your arguments is "Excel has complicated nested formulas that are difficult to follow" I don't think showing off a Python one-liner as an alternative is the greatest example. That one-liner is doing about five things that could have been separated into steps to show off the relative clarity and flexibility of the approach. It is better...that example just doesn't do a good job showing it.
- The difference is that the Python one-liner calculates the entire thing whereas in Excel a complicated formula only calculates one cell, and may be different from cell to cell (unless you use array formulas in Excel, which are rare).by kccqzy
- I don't really agree, moreover I haven't had the same experience at all.
I find engineers almost never using spreadsheets, ever for clearly tabular data. My coworkers certainly never use nested-ifs. Many times they will put a crappy table into jira instead, which multiple team members will be overwriting each other's work.
by zug_zug - Coders get a little sniffy about Excel sometimes, but it's so good at achieving 80%-ness across multiple axes that I can't see it being displaced.
- the lowest barrier to entry for pretty much anyone in corporate life. Boot PC, there it is.
- rapid data exploration. Just put something in a cell. Play around.
- extensive self-, community-, pro-, and AI help.
- an impressively powerful programming engine. Well, two really, one of which survives after 30 years and multiple murder attempts by Microsoft. You can build complete applications, UIs, database front ends, etc.
- serious tooling for power users via toolpaks and plugins
- just enough tooling to add visual polish to outputs.
Excel isnt the best at many things (I still pine for Improv, tbh) but it's good enough at a lot of things for that not to matter, and its so easy to get started, the allure is hard to ignore.
Gsheets comes close, but still (to my mind) smells amateurish for power users. Maybe that's my problem rather than Google's.
by kjellsbells - I don't use spreadsheets much myself. But I'm not against them as a means of interfacing with non technical people used to using them.
And I have used them as an alternative to a UI with very poor UX that developers came up with for a team of material scientists to use. This thing was basically unusable. Sometimes, it's just easier to go where the users are rather than to try to get them to use something new or different. These people were dealing with a lot of specifications in PDF form. Loads of tables basically. So, spreadsheets were a good fit as that was what they were doing anyway. They loved it. Soon after they discovered databases, python and sql. So there is that.
The reason spreadsheets are widely used is because nothing better really came along that did the same job for everyone. There were of course lots of tools for specific use cases that are somewhat widely used now. But most of these tools are fairly niche compared to spreadsheets.
These days getting data in and out of spreadsheets is not that big of a deal with AI coding tools. A lot of white collar workers are starting to use those. So, switching to something better/appropriate is much less of a challenge now than it used to be.
- While putting formulas in cells is confusing a single use script somewhere on the file system is also terrible and looking at it isn't all that obvious what is going on either. If you put everything in a db you need the ancient art of SQL Kung Fu. Great if you can, to bad if you can't. I like joins, it instantly confused the hell out of the uninitiated. You can make the query complicated enough that even a seasoned champion needs a warm up before lifting.
I remember my first thought looking at excel. They force name and number everything which is exactly like using single letter variables, they are only allowed for simple things. Using row numbers is even worse. Each additional col of numbers makes it harder to find things and it invites mistakes.
I'm not complaining, each solution survived because it has great advantages. JSON and XML have their place too ofc.
My gut says that after learning the advantages and disadvantages we should be able to make something better.
I put CSVs in html documents, use JS, run from the file system, output is CSV usually. I haven't tested the limit of html files but if you put a comment at the bottom the rendering engine ignores it efficiently.
One more bad solution for your collection.
by econ - > They force name and number everything which is exactly like using single letter variables, they are only allowed for simple things.
This isn't true, named ranges have existed for longer than many (most?) HN readers have been alive. As far as I'm aware they were in the first version in 1985.
Joel Spolsky's "you suck at Excel" is more than a decade old but still relevant: https://youtu.be/JxBg4sMusIg
by Arainach - As a spreadsheet user first, this just reads as programmer prefers programming.
Many times the spreadsheet is a collaborative document. One way to use spreadsheets is you use it for a number of iterations, get your outcome quickly, let stakeholders give feedback and adjust the approach. Then once it becomes stable, then you turn it into a database/app/script. Errors in spreadsheets are obvious to more users than errors in code because your work is shown, not hidden.
Taking a csv file and writing bash is not the answer. If you are doing that, you should probably get back to work/research.
by chux52 - Reviewing the individual formulas in an excel report is psychotic. Normally what I would do when checking someone elses work for errors is spot check a couple of the values in a column and calculate them by hand to see if they matched up. Either that or just implement the step myself in excel and see if I got the same output.
That's a lot like reviewing someone's regular expression. Like I'm not going to read through a 100 character regex to see if it matches semantic versions, I'm just gonna pull it up on a regular expression tester and see if it does what it should.
by sherburt3 - > Like I'm not going to read through a 100 character regex to see if it matches semantic versions, I'm just gonna pull it up on a regular expression tester and see if it does what it should.
How? Do you have all the values from the semantic versions lying around for a comprehensive test in the engine?
But also those 100 chars can be in 10 lines with comments, so you can fire the engine on specific parts to help with verification
by eviks - I have just recently learned there is a great feature for this, which I really miss in LibreOffice, since I came to know it exists:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/display-the-relati...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-US/Excel/see-links-between-...
These really helped me to review low-to-mid complexity sheets where inserted rows and incorrectly copied formulas messed up stuff.
by fodkodrasz - The humble spreadsheet is the most robust data analysis tool of our lifetime and the two exceptions provided by the author (fit-on-screen data, temp storage) ignores a variety of uses that several comments itt reference.
The key value IMO - as other have said - is that it's sharable to non-technical folks.
by LMKIIW - The key value is that it’s a visual tool with native usability affordances addressing the needs of novices as well as power users — we have too few of such tools.by layer8
- You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel. Samsung’s Austin fab, at least circa 2020-ish, was generating machine labels with it. These are paper cards, roughly 2” x 4”, which carry the following information:
* Machine name / number
* Owning technician’s name, shift, photo, and phone number
* Owning engineer’s name, shift, photo, and phone number
My team had something like 250 machines spread across 4 shifts. We had to redo cards anytime we gained or lost someone on any team, which often included rebalancing the workload. Luckily, someone had made an Excel macro that connected to a MSSQL DB that had employee information (IIRC, it didn’t have confidential information like pay in it; I think it was used for generating badges), pulled all of the required fields, and automatically filled the template. Send them to the printer, cut them apart, and go place them.
My contribution while there was to implement a crude pathing optimization that tried to assign contiguous machines to a given technician, to minimize the amount they had to walk for weekly checks. It kinda worked; better than nothing, anyway.
by sgarland - > You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel.
A friend of mine writes all of their correspondence in it.
by flobosg - A former coworker was previously employed in high finance in London, his entire job was keeping the rickety lattice of interlinked spreadsheets across the company working and alive. People would type in a number in one spreadsheet, and after several hours, another number would appear via the lattice in a more influential spreadsheet.
The company made money, so it worked, but he swears is caused him to start prematurely balding. Maybe a convenient excuse, but also plausible.
by EdwardDiego - > You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel. Samsung’s Austin fab, at least circa 2020-ish, was generating machine labels with it.
Generating machine labels seems useful, but I don't think that feels particularly horrifying or amazing. Just like, yeah, that's something it should be able to do.
by mcphage - This should have either been a Word template that used mail merge to insert the data into fields or an Access form.
Checklist: #1 Are you doing calculations? Yes: Use a spreadsheet No: Use another tool - >You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel.
I've never seen a better explanation of the tool than that one sentence